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Enabling vStorage API for Array Integration

What is it?
By default these three primitives described above are not enabled upon install and must be enabled in the advanced settings for the ESX server, and they must have the correct array firmware loaded for this feature to work. Enabling or disabling these primitives is done through the advanced settings on the ESX servers.

Three settings under advanced settings:

DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedMove - full copy (1 is enabled, 0 is disabled)

It is listed in the index and table of contents as “storage hardware acceleration.”
In the 4.1 release, the VAAI is supported for block-based storage only and requires the six storage partners to update firmware supporting this vStorage API for Array Integration.

Why is Block Level Locking important?
It helps combat the best practice of only having a configuration maximum of 10 VMDK's per LUN due to LUN locking practices in VMware. This removes the limitation and increases performance.

Ever wanted a way to ping an entire subnet and don't have access to a tool to do it? Well this one liner allows that.

The For at the beginning says the variable $i is equal to one, the semicolon separates it from the amount of times the loop is run 1..254 and then the $i++ increments the loop by 1. (You can specify every 5th IP if you want)

The next section runs the windows builtin ping.exe command (make sure you include the .EXE extension) with the switch -n (which means number of times) and then in brackets you are specifying the IP to ping. The where statement at the end is looking for a match of "bytes=32" default output for a successful ping.

I was working with VMware Update Manager and was running a scan on the entire VMguest infrastructure. Well the Update Manager service hung. I am not going to say anything more about that. :)

So I went to the UM server and attempted to restart the service. It sat in stop pending for quite awhile so I decided to kill the process. hmmm how do I do that? I was going to use powershell but the only cmdlet's available are to get- and stop- and restart-. All in the same token as going through the GUI.

Tasklist.exe /SVC
This displays all of the services running and their PID

Taskkill.exe /PID <PID #> /T
This terminates the service and child processes.

This killed the Update Scan on the VIclient and allowed me to restart the service.